Insight and trends in search marketing for lawyers.

05/10/2016

SEO isn’t what it used to be. Marketers used to have SEO down to a science – they could represent it almost entirely as numbers on a spreadsheet. In 2016, SEO depends on more intangible factors and requires a holistic approach.

Just a few years ago it seems many attorneys were still scoffing at the importance of search engine optimization (SEO) for their law firm website. I even heard platform speakers declare, "SEO does not matter!" and one listserv almost went viral as attorneys piled on that "SEO is dead."

SEO has always had its naysayers. Nonetheless, SEO continues to thrive. In fact, according to a recent study by Borrell Associates, companies will spend $65 billion on SEO this year. What’s more, they predict the SEO industry will grow to an estimated $72 billion by 2018 and $79 billion by 2020.

One reason you might think SEO is dead (or doesn't matter) is because it's constantly changing. As Silverman wrote, "The techniques and technology SEOs use become obsolete as fast as bloggers can publish their 10 tips to improve SEO.”

At Integrity Marketing we have the advantage of insight into Google Analytics tracking across hundreds of law firm websites. As we see SEO trends develop, we incorporate them into our Best Practices for our clients.

Here are three of the most compelling trends we see right now:

What Worked in 2010 Won't Cut It in 2016Gaming the system simply doesn't work anymore. It's estimated that Google implements approximately 500 search algorithm changes a year. Today SEO success does not rely on identifying high-traffic, low-competition keywords and stuffing them into your site wherever possible. We've also seen that outbound linking (and black hat, invisible link techniques) has little impact (or can get you banished from Google's index!) and that "more content" is not the way to get a better presence on search. As Silverman wrote, SEO today requires a more holistic approach with many variables at play.

Content that specifically answers questions will not only appeal to searchers, but will boost your credibility and make for a better user experience on your site than content that simply matches keywords. I recently saw an SEO scam where the company offered to take over managing SEO for one of our clients. When we asked them what, specifically, they planned to do, they offered pages and pages of content stuffed with keywords -- some of it almost nonsensical, some completely inaccurate and some that would actually violate the ethics rules on lawyer advertising! If someone solicits you to manage your SEO, remember that good optimization requires a sophisticated, holistic approach that is much more than just throwing keywords on a page!

Design for a Good User ExperienceEmphasis on the word "user." We sometimes find clients design websites to please themselves, with little regard for real-world usability. Your website should welcome, engage and even entertain your guests. It's imperative to understand the Customer Journey and how users flow through your site, then design for the best possible experience. Google will reward you with a greater presence on search ... and your visitors will reward you as they become new clients.

Finally, remember that exciting, engaging content like well-done video gets people talking ... and sharing. The better your content, the more your audience will share and engage with you, and the more visibility you’ll have on social and ultimately search engines.

05/06/2016

SEO and social media, in particular, are virtual minefields where even a silly mistake can bring your brand equity crashing down. If you are not familiar with online customer outreach and social media marketing activities, ensure you hire a smart and experienced team, or outsource your requirements to a reputed SEO consultant. This will help relieve the burden on your shoulders as well as allow you to concentrate on other critical needs of your growing business.

Search engine optimization, properly executed and maintained, should get your digital marketing in front of the most qualified prospects: those who are looking for your services and ready to engage an attorney right away. Most attorneys understand how important this is to growing a law firm, but SEO still may seem mysterious and almost magical.

Misunderstandings can lead to frustrations like these:

I'm a better attorney than (fill in the blank), but they show up higher than me!We hear this one a lot. It's normal to feel slighted when Google chooses to display someone else's website higher than your own, especially in a competitive field like law. But, honestly, it has nothing to do with whether the other guy is better than you ... at least not as a lawyer. The other guy may be doing some things better than you, like being more social on Facebook or getting more client reviews.

It's taking soooo long! Sometimes a newly optimized website will jump right up to page one ... other times it's a waiting game.

SEO is undeniably a waiting game. You wait for rewarding opportunities, exciting social media interactions, and natural and organic growth in traffic. But SEO returns can be hastened if you have the right people on board working for you.

One of the most important things we do for our clients is manage their search engine optimization, from the technical aspects of a website (like those 301 redirects mentioned in the article above) to social media integration, fresh content, constant monitoring and more.

If you want to learn more about SEO for your law firm website, sign up for our Legal Marketing Boot Camp. Wednesday's session, "Search Engine Optimization: Is It Dead Yet?" covers the most important issues in SEO:

Mark Twain once said, “The report of my death was an exaggeration.” The same is now true of SEO or Search Engine Optimization. While certainly not dead, SEO definitely has changed. First, you want to start thinking in terms of local search, or location-based marketing. It’s all about taking advantage of the search engines’ ability to deliver relevant, local results to motivated prospects when they are ready to move. And yes, it’s more than just adding some key words to your website. Local search is a high-stakes game with very strict rules. Knowing how those rules interact with consumer behavior is the key to winning new business online.

05/04/2016

Luckily, there are a number of strategies to ensure your website ends up on the first page of Google results instead of on the 42nd moon of Jupiter. These strategies are known as search engine optimization (SEO) and include a number of tools and tactics, from a user-friendly website design to a robust presence on social media to cleverly crafted copy.

Even a terrific website won't grow your law firm if people can't find it in a Google search. As an internet user yourself, you probably have a pretty good understanding of how important it is to show up on the first page of Google results ... especially when people are searching for your services in your market. Not so much for those who are hoping to find an attorney three states away from you, right?

The Internet, like the universe, is constantly expanding. According to a recent study, we collectively send 500 million tweets, upload 4 million hours of video to YouTube, like 5.75 billion things on Facebook, and perform 6 billion Google searches every day. Which means the Internet shares another quality with the universe – if you’re not careful, your content will disappear into a black hole, never to be seen again.

Despite what you may have heard (or read on the interwebs!), SEO is not simple, it's not dead, and it's never a once-and-done proposition. Oh, and there are still gray-hat and even black-hat tactics that some unscrupulous (or inexperienced) SEO providers employ that can backfire. Usually, these tactics will work for a short period of time, often rocketing a website to Google's page one before getting blacklisted and banned to search engine oblivion.

One of the reasons Integrity Marketing is so successful getting our clients ranked well is that we take an holistic approach to your digital marketing. In other words, while we definitely implement best practices on your website, we also take into account how your email marketing will impact your SEO (yes, your email marketing affects your SEO!), how social media drives search engine results, and especially how users interact with your website once they get there. When it comes to search engine rank, Google's constant goal is to deliver the most relevant results; the results most likely to meet the needs of their users (aka, people conducting the Google search).

That concept bears repeating:

Google's constant goal is to deliver the most relevant results; the results most likely to meet the needs of their users (aka, people conducting the Google search).

They don't care if you're a great attorney, have tons of credentials, or have spent a lot of money on your digital marketing. They care about the user. And that's why they still dominate online search.

You may not know it, but your IMS account manager is, for the most part, a silent super hero. We don't send you an alert every time we make an adjustment to boost or maintain your position on the search engine results page. We just do it, and trust that you realize your website didn't land on page one because someone sprinkled magic pixie dust over it. It's your account manager, rolling up his or her sleeves, staring down the data, and making the ongoing adjustments that keeps you in front of prospective clients.

Here are just a few of the things our SEO experts do for you, behind-the-scenes, to get (and keep) your website on Google's page one.

Submit and check your website’s sitemap. The Internet is a vast system of information and data. While search engines crawl through it fairly regularly, there’s a chance they may overlook some important part of your website, or that they’ve fallen behind schedule and haven't indexed your latest blog post. By submitting sitemaps manually, we control what web crawlers see and how often they look.

Adjust the crawl rate of search engine bots for your website. Sometimes you don’t want the search engine bots crawling your site frequently, as their presence can occasionally slow down your site or server. We can implement a crawl delay value, which forces the crawler to wait a specific amount of time between visits. This can help keep your site running smoothly and loading quickly, which improves the user experience ... which improves your SEO.

Analyze keyword searches and click-through rates that led users to your website. How are people finding your website? What words are they searching? How long do they stay on your website and what other links do they click on? We use all of this data to gain incredible insight that guides how we tweak website design, create new content, focus blog posts, or craft a video marketing strategy. Knowing what users want makes it much easier to give them what they want.

Your account manager uses some of the most sophisticated web analytics tools available to get your SEO results. Beyond Google's webmaster tools, IMS employs several third-party services to help aggregate, analyze and enhance your critical data. We also find that E2 CRM tracking gives us granular data about how users interact with your website, email marketing, and blog content that is helping us super charge optimization efforts for those clients using it.

Finally, you can be your own best ally in search engine optimization. How? Attend our upcoming Legal Marketing Boot Camp and work with us to craft better strategy, design and critical sales processes that can boost your conversions by more than 70 percent. The Boot Camp runs from June 8 to 10th at the IMS headquarters in Kansas City. There are still a few seats available, but registration is limited.

05/02/2016

Jennifer Campbell Goddard, CEO of Integrity Marketing Solutions, will be speaking in June at an international conference on digital marketing. The Amsterdam conference, to be held June 22-23, is a major digital marketing event, with speakers from Google, Twitter and other key industry leaders. The conference theme is What is the DNA of a Digital Marketing Services Agency?

This will be a return engagement for Ms Goddard, and conference organizer Peter Buxton said he was pleased she agreed to come back. "Jennifer's presentation at the Local Search Today! conference in December 2014 was evaluated by delegates as the best presentation of the event. She made a clear case for the massive changes needed to market goods and services now that the sales funnel has been replaced with a dynamic and fragmented path that demands a far more sophisticated approach to marketing ... Jennifer's presentation style is both entertaining and informative. She is a great addition to our programme."

"Peter and his company have a strong reputation for hosting some of the highest-quality, most prestigious events in our industry," Goddard said. "They have the key contacts and are able to recruit some of the best minds in digital. I was honored to be invited, and even more so to be invited back."

Goddard will be the only US speaker on the platform. She has been asked to provide insight into how digital marketing agencies succeed in the US. Specifically, she will address the key values and core beliefs that drive a digital marketing agency, and how these differ from traditional marketing agencies.

"I bring a somewhat unique perspective," she added. "Many of the key players in our industry, such as Google and Twitter, are relatively new and were born as digital companies. But Integrity Marketing was founded in 1995 as a traditional, print-centric marketing agency serving a niche market of estate planning attorneys. My story is about leading major change and navigating the transformation of a small, traditional agency to a prominent digital services agency."

For example, Goddard points to Integrity Marketing's upcoming Legal Marketing Boot Camp, an annual event hosted at their headquarters just outside of Kansas City. "We bring clients in from around the country to work on digital marketing strategies. This year we introduced a proprietary CRM with full integration across all digital properties. Our clients are now learning more about marketing automation, lead nurturing, and conversion optimization. Its an ever-changing, ever-evolving industry and lawyers simply cannot afford to be the Analog Guy in a digital world."

05/01/2016

If you and your law firm are still hating on social media in general, and Facebook in particular, it's time to stop the hate and start getting social.

While search engines like Google still send the most new visitors to your website, social media is gaining. A recent study released by Shareaholic shows that top eight social media platforms drove more than 30 percent of overall traffic to websites.

Over the years, our media consumption habits have changed dramatically. We rely less on homepages and search engines, discovering news pertinent to us through social media.

While we find that most attorneys have a relative comfort level with LinkedIn, which is generally viewed as "more professional," the truth is that LinkedIn isn't a big help to your online marketing efforts In fact, LinkedIn accounts for only 0.03% of all referral traffic ... which means you're not going to grow your law firm with LinkedIn referrals.

The big winner? Perhaps your most-hated social network, Facebook, turns out to be the gorilla in the room when it comes to building your online referrals. Facebook drives nearly 1/4 of all referral traffic (24.63%). Pinterest is a distant second, driving slightly more than 5%. Twitter won't help you much, either, driving, on average, less than one percent (0.82%) of new visitors to your website.

What does this mean to you?

If you're not actively building your Facebook network, you're leaving money on the table. And hobbling your online marketing.

Integrity Marketing helps all of our clients set up, integrate and post to social media with a special focus on Facebook. But if you want to turbo-charge your online marketing and see drastic results, use our services as the foundation of a robust social media marketing effort.

The first step? Check your law firm's Facebook page to see how many LIKES you have. This is your potential audience for posts to your page - or the number of people who will have a chance of seeing your posts in their news feed. While all Facebook pages are public (which means anyone can see them), the news feed is the prime real estate on Facebook. If only a handful of people LIKE your page, your social reach is going to be very small. For inspiration, check out the number of Likes on the Integrity Marketing Solutions page.

A few tips for growing your Facebook audience:

Add a Facebook Like Button to your WebsiteIn most cases, we have already done this for you (unless you specifically told us not to, in which case send in a support ticket and we'll fix that for you!)

Consider Facebook AdvertisingIntegrity Marketing can help you set up a modest advertising campaign on Facebook to help grow your audience. Facebook ads allow you to target your page promotion ads to the specific audiences you want as Facebook fans. Generally speaking, a small budget over a long time frame can be very effective promoting your page. Remember, though, it's best to up your social game before you launch any type of page promotion (see below).

Up Your Game with Engaging ContentIf you haven’t posted to your Facebook page in a while, or you are only auto-posting your blogs, start by becoming more social. Share interesting news about your law firm, start discussions on topics pertaining to estate planning or elder law issues, tell special stories about your clients (with permission of course) and pose questions to get to know your audience.

04/30/2016

There is a lot of confusion in the SEO world about duplicate content. Since many attorneys use licensed and syndicated content in varying ways on their websites and in their blogs, it's important to understand what's really going on with the duplicate content issue.

There is no such thing as a duplicate content penalty.Let's get that out right now. Here are a few snippets directly from Google regarding duplicate content:

"Duplicate content generally refers to substantive blocks of content within or across domains that either completely match other content or are appreciably similar. Mostly, this is not deceptive in origin...Duplicate content on a site is not grounds for action on that site unless it appears that the intent of the duplicate content is to be deceptive and manipulate search engine results."

There are best practices for publishing syndicated and licensed content in your blogs and on your website. The search engine experts at Integrity Marketing Solutions understand this and we do the "behind the scenes" coding on your website to make sure you get the maximum value from your licensed content. As regards your blogging, follow the instructions of your Account Manager and not only will you never suffer a (mythical) duplicate content penalty, but the blogs will boost your website's SEO just as we have designed.

Google Still Hates ANY Content that is Spammy or Keyword StuffingYeah, at the end of the day, good content is still King and spammy, keyword stuffing -- whether original or duplicate -- still raises Google's ire.

Here's a short video from Matt Cutts at Google to explain:

Syndicated Content is NOT "Bad" for Your SEOIntegrity Marketing Solutions provides syndicated legal content for our attorney clients. We sometimes get push-back when clients visit with a self-proclaimed SEO guru who warns them against this duplicate content issue.

To corroborate the FACT that syndicated content is not bad for your SEO, let me share insight from another widely used content syndication firm, NewsCred.

The reality: There are too many self-appointed ” gurus” out there whispering misinformation about SEO and content syndication to their clients. This myth stems from the idea that search engines penalize sites with “duplicate content.” SEO is obviously important to traffic growth, so this issue warrants a closer look.

It is widely known that Google doesn’t like to recommend sites that consist of nothing but scraped content. However, Google has no issue with syndicated content. What really matters to search engines is the distinction between shady content farming techniques and legitimate syndication.

The bottom line is that legitimate syndication through a credible publisher like Integrity Marketing means more pages that will be indexed, and does not affect your Google PageRank whatsoever. We have never seen a client get blacklisted or suffer any type of penalty after publishing our syndicated content, to the contrary, our clients see literally millions of page views from search generated by syndicated content.

04/29/2016

Your [website] leads are initiating contact with you, seeking you out. That makes them incredibly qualified leads… but it also means you probably aren’t the only solution they are considering.

Columnist Jacob Baadsgaard writes for SearchEngineLand of a client who had decided that online search just wasn't right for his business. Though the client felt their online campaigns had paid for themselves, he said they really weren't generating enough new business to be profitable.

"To be honest," Baadsgaard writes, "this conclusion came as a surprise."

Baadsgaard goes on to write that, by every available metric, the campaigns were "killing it," driving hundreds of qualified leads. The problem, however, was that instead of closing the expected 10 percent of those leads, the client was only able to close about one percent.

The issue was not in the quality of the leads, but rather in the way the leads were being handled. As Baadsgaard's client learned, without the right sales process in place, even the best campaigns won't produce a profit.

Your law firm handles prospective new clients every day, and you likely have a time-tested process for engaging new clients from your workshops, client referrals and allied professionals. But your digital leads are different.

Here are three tips to help you close more new business from your successful online marketing:

Response time matters.Research shows that fully half of online prospects choose the firm that responds to their inquiries first. Also of note, your web leads are 100% more likely to respond if you contact them within five minutes of their first inquiry. Whenever possible, respond to your online leads within five minutes, and never send website callers to voice mail or let them wait on hold for prolonged periods of time.

Keep contacting them. Shoot for 8 to 12 contact attempts over a two-week period. Sound like a lot? For most firms it does. You need to pre-plan your follow up, don't just "wing it." And, to avoid looking spammy, make sure each contact delivers value to your prospect, keeping them engaged and perhaps even entertained.

Get them off the market!Your web leads are in a decision-making mode, they are ready to schedule an appointment. If you don’t take them off the market, someone else will. Research shows this is particularly important for companies with more expensive products or service, like law firms. If take too long to respond to their inquiries, or the soonest appointment you can offer them is three weeks away, they will move on to engage another firm. The more quickly you can engage your website leads and convince them that they’ve found the right solution, the sooner you will get them off of the market and away from the competition.